His Flask, His Friend
by Homicide.and.Suicide.777
Summary: Rick don gets right depressing in this one broh. Seem's he's got a sad habit too. You gotta read to find out, broh. You gotta read to find out... Spoilers for Season 2 Episode 10; "The Wedding Squanchers." Rated T for language.


**A/N: Spoilers for Season 2 Episode 10; "The Wedding Squanchers." Rated T for language. (Sorry for the first time I published this and there was coding/HTML crap all over it. Clearly I've fixed that now.)**

Rick Sanchez liked people to believe that he traveled through life and space alone. He wanted them to know that his only friend was the silver flask in his pocket. Rick Sanchez, as the universe knew him, didn't have a heart.

But of course, that wasn't quite true, and right about now, Rick was suffering because of his damn emotional attachments that he wished he could avoid, but always seemed trapped in. He was angry, and hurt, and mostly, _he was in pain._ Because, despite all of Rick's efforts to replace "Wubba Lubba Dub Dub" with "I Don't Give A Fuck," he'd still struggled to maintain his reprieve from the pain, and he still ended up somehow giving a damn about what happened to the people he regretfully cared about.

This was made abundantly clear as Rick watched Bird Person, the one who Rick had just admitted was his best friend, get shot dead. And God-Damnit, that had fucking _hurt._

But now Rick sat with a blank stare on his face, gazing at the shiny silver flask in his hands with a numbed expression achieved through many swigs of the burning liquid. His eyes glossed over slightly, though no tears spilt and no emotions played on his face. As always, the universe could see nothing. And as Rick sat on a wet patch of grass on a comically small version of Earth, his family was also none the wiser. Some of them, like Jerry, were angry. Others were too preoccupied with the future and were too fooled by the uncaring demeanor Rick always carried to notice the discomfort Rick was in. Silently torn between pleased and destroyed over the fact that his family didn't care to come see what he was doing sitting in the rain, Rick pulled out a flathead screwdriver. He fumbled with the flask as his long fingers were slightly numbed by the cold rain, but he still easily managed to hold it steady as he placed the sharp tip of the screwdriver against the metal of the canister with a soft metallic _'tink'_ sound.

Steadying his shaking hand as much as possible and stilling the raging shitty emotions inside of him thoroughly, Rick Sanchez drew the metal tip of his tool across the back side of his flask, leaving behind a small, deep little scratch, revealing a line of shinier silver exposed beneath the layer of tarnished silver formed by neglect and the grime of a thousand bars on many different worlds.

The small line was only about an inch long, and sat alongside two others. Rick reached up a still slightly trembling hand to feel the once smooth surface of the flask, now feeling many similar lines that littered the back of his flask in clusters of five, excluding the most recent group towards the bottom of the area with scratches, which was only a cluster of three, including the newest blemish in the metal. Rick's eyes grazed over the numerous marks, a deep sadness seeping into his eyes and across his face.

These marks were his tally marks; they were his way to remember the friends that he'd lost. Rick didn't admit it to many people, for obvious reasons, but he'd had many friends over the years. Friends from the war, the rebellion, from his life before... And each little scratch on his flask represented another friend he'd lost. They were tallies numbering the friends he'd never see again, carried in his coat pocket at all times, never leaving his side and holding his mind-numbing elixir. There were tallies for war buddies who died in action, marks for friends he'd met and lost along his way in a pointless fucking life... hell, there was even a mark for his late ex-wife; Beth's mother. She had, at least at one point, been his friend, and when he'd learnt that she'd passed away, it had stung like a bitch. It had hurt because he'd realized that he no longer had a chance to patch things up with her. He'd never get to right the wrongs he'd done to her; to fix his mistakes...

And now, among the dozen or so other marks running half way down the back of his flask, there was a small silver line for Bird Person.

Rick stared down at the parallel and less frequently diagonal tally lines, moisture forming slightly in his eyes as he tried to blink it back. And there, on a worthless little shit-ball of a planet, feeling as pathetic and alone as a single piece of driftwood lost in an infinite sea, Rick Sanchez let a single tear slide down his face, masked by the rain falling on his face and dripping from his spiky pale hair.

And in that moment, for at least a moment, Rick Sanchez could only allow for one pathetic, depressed thought to flow through his mind like booze in his bloodstream.

 _"I hate my fucking life."_


End file.
